50 A REPORTER AT LARGE NEW ORLEANS: DECATUR STREET A BLANK sun stares down at Decatur Street. The sky is high, and, as al ways here, shows clouds which, strangely, do not affect the intensity of light. The air hangs heavy, with no perceptible stir, except that occasionally there is a strong odor from the docks where coffee is being unloaded from boats of Brazil. This is the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, with houses that date from the Spanish domination: blue shutters on sordid plaster, green shutters opening on narrow galleries. All have fine rail- ings; festoons of cast-iron grapes and black twining leaves are looped along a second story with wet wash; formal intricacies of the early eighteen-hun- . dreds project over the pavement signs of J ax and Regal Beer . Under the gal- leries Decatur Street garishly rots in the sun. In the aftern<?on, the dubious bar- bershops, red-striped and fly-specked, are not drowsier than the riverfront sa- loons. But at night the latter waken with sinister entertainment. An eleven- year-old boy, his face racked by sleep- lessness (he is said to support a mother and four younger children), sings to the music of a hammered piano "On the Isle of Capri," with the mechanical ges- tures of a suffering doll. Monotonous jazz is provided by Negroes, liquor by bars; sailors come here from the ends of the world, the girls mostly from the hill country of the surrounding states. They are not called hostesses, for they order these things more directly in the South; after prohibition there was never any hint that the saloon should not return. The darkness of back rooms is alive, on t good night, with crowded shapes of love in the making. Painted invitations outside saloons are for seamen: "Sink Your Hook in Here." Doorways opening on tobac- co-colored corridors advertise "Rooms for Spanish and Filipino Sailors," with prices from fifteen to fifty cents. Pop- eye and the native pirate, Jean Lafitte, lend their names to places of amuse- ment. Blank's Place declares that it is "Famous from Coast to Coast." In- side, it has between bar and back rooms the usual white lattice, inscribed "Tables for Ladies" and surmounted by seven white stars each inscribed with a girl's name-Doris, Nora, Edna, Dorothy, Helen, Marie, Mary Ann. New Orleans is a Southern port, and in this aspect resembles an American Marseilles, expurgated, it is true, from time to time, for this is, after all, Amer- ica. The latest purge, which was be- gun something over a year ago, came as a result of the controversy between the late Huey Long and the city gov- ernment of New Orleans. The under- world, which was with the state dicta- tor almost to a man, quite faithfully believed, as long as he was alive, that once the Hillbilly Napoleon was trium- phant and the last remnants of the Bourbon regime destroyed, every.thing would be wide open again. Huey is dead by assassination. And his inter- diction stands against the famous old district, through which generations of great Creole ladies drove on their way to the opera. It closed most of the houses and all of the shutters. It also overcrowded the waterfront. T HE French Market begins with the Creole Café du Monde, which also allows itself to be known as the Original Coffee Stand. It looks, be- yond the corner of Decatur Street, at the only baroque square in t1t1is Ameri- ca. In Jackson Square the general on horseback, uprearing in bronze, is sur"" rounded by a staff-in constant attend- ance-of bench-warmers, panhandlers, and river bums. They look across a green luxuriance of tropical vegeta- tion to a waste of railroad tracks and . the great warehouses on the docks. The Mississippi runs below them, a swift, deep, yellow, muddy flood. Nowhere, not even at New Orleans, did the Americans of the last century know how to put their waterways to any but commercial uses. Water traffic is al- ways pleasant to watch: white paddle- boat ferries, the unloadings from the tropics to the concrete docks. But the Mississippi is romantic only to the mind; here it is an ugly river, in its lower stretches between levees, the only ugly river I remember ever to have seen in America. Once, if we may judge by the small model in the Cabildo, the old Halle des Boucheries of the French Market must have looked extraordinarily like a prim- itive Greek temple, on squat columns, all the space under the roof open to the air. Progress in the nineteenth century half enclosed the arcades with bathroom - ! ' ' f'\ . " > , ; "v fJ' -J ;l ''1'''",,' ... . . . /;, :--:' ' 'Y' ....H. ) , .' .v;, ;jpf( ; .. ., "' " "'"," ... . - .l' j 7 /_ ...r:'<,,:' :: . 'ì 1 j. " : .W i '" { . . ', .,"':,; \ . V. 'ÿ"",.. .".'" , . ' , ..)r ' <: y " ji t . f . ; '. '. .' . ,.' ,. ii " fi7 CCWe're just a little mite cross this 111orning, Doctor. We didn't sleep well."